In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, these mushrooms were described as teo-nancatl, which can be translated as "sacred mushroom."
There are indications that ceremonial use of such mushrooms reaches far back into pre-Columbian times. So-called mushroom stones have been found in El Salvador, Guatemala, and the contiguous mountainous districts of Mexico. These are stone sculptures in the form of pileate mushroom, on whose stem the face or the form of a god or an animal-like demon is carved. Most are about 30 cm high. The oldest examples, according to archaeologists, date back to before 500 B.C.
R. G. Wasson argues, quite convincingly, that there is a connection between these mushroom stones and teonanácatl. If true, this means that the mushroom cult, the magico-medicinal and religious-ceremonial use of the magic mushrooms, is more than two thousand years old.
To the Christian missionaries, the inebriating, vision- and hallucination-producing effects of these mushrooms seemed to be Devil's work. They therefore tried, with all the means in their power, to extirpate their use. But they succeeded only partially, for the Indians have continued secretly down to our time to utilize the mushroom teonanácatl, which was sacred to them.
Strange to say, the reports in the old chronicles about the use of magic mushrooms remained unnoticed during the following centuries, probably because they were considered products of the imagination of a superstitious age.
All traces of the existence of "sacred mushrooms" were in danger of becoming obliterated once and for all, when, in 1915, an American botanist of repute, Dr. W. E.
Safford, in an address before the Botanical Society in Washington and in a scientific publication, advanced the thesis that no such thing as magic mushrooms had ever existed at alclass="underline" the Spanish chroniclers had taken the mescaline cactus for a mushroom! Even if false, this proposition of Safford's served nevertheless to direct the attention of the scientific world to the riddle of the mysterious mushrooms.
It was the Mexican physician Dr. Blas Pablo Reko who first openly disagreed with Safford's interpretation and who found evidence that mushrooms were still employed in medicinal-religious ceremonies even in our time, in remote districts of the southern mountains of Mexico. But not until the years 19338 did the anthropologist Robert J.
Weitlaner and Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, a botanist from Harvard University, find actual mushrooms in that region, which were used there for this ceremonial purpose; and only in 1938 could a group of young American anthropologists, under the direction of Jean Bassett Johnson, attend a secret nocturnal mushroom ceremony for the first time.
This was in Huautla de Jiménez, the capital of the Mazatec country, in the State of Oaxaca. But these researchers were only spectators, they were not permitted to partake of the mushrooms. Johnson reported on the experience in a Swedish journal ( Ethnological Studies 9, 1939).
Then exploration of the magic mushrooms was interrupted. World War II broke out.
Schultes, at the behest of the American government, had to occupy himself with rubber production in the Amazon territory, and Johnson was killed after the Allied landing in North Africa.
It was the American researchers, the married couple Dr. Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and her husband, R. Gordon Wasson, who again took up the problem from the ethnographic aspect. R. G. Wasson was a banker, vice-president of the J. P. Morgan Co.
in New York. His wife, who died in 1958, was a pediatrician. The Wassons began their work in 1953, in the Mazatec village Huautla de Jiménez, where fifteen years earlier J. B.
Johnson and others had established the continued existence of the ancient Indian mushroom cult. They received especially valuable information from an American missionary who had been active there for many years, Eunice V. Pike, member of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. Thanks to her knowledge of the native language and her ministerial association with the inhabitants, Pike had information about the significance of the magic mushrooms that nobody else possessed. During several lengthy sojourns in Huautla and environs, the Wassons were able to study the present use of the mushrooms in detail and compare it with the descriptions in the old chronicles. This showed that the belief in the "sacred mushrooms" was still prevalent in that region. However, the Indians kept their beliefs a secret from strangers. It took great tact and skill, therefore, to gain the confidence of the indigenous population and to receive insight into this secret domain.
In the modern form of the mushroom cult, the old religious ideas and customs are mingled with Christian ideas and Christian terminology. Thus the mushrooms are often spoken of as the blood of Christ, because they will grow only where a drop of Christ's blood has fallen on the earth. According to another notion, the mushrooms sprout where a drop of saliva from Christ's mouth has moistened the ground, and it is therefore Jesus Christ himself who speaks through the mushrooms.
The mushroom ceremony follows the form of a consultation. The seeker of advice or a sick person or his or her family questions a "wise man" or a "wise woman," a sabio or sabia, also named curandero or curandera, in return for a modest payment. Curandero can best be translated into English as "healing priest," for his function is that of a physician as well as that of a priest, both being found only rarely in these remote regions.
In the Mazatec language the healing priest is called co-ta-ci-ne, which means "one who knows." He eats the mushroom in the framework of a ceremony that always takes place at night. The other persons present at the ceremony may sometimes receive mushrooms as well, yet a much greater dose always goes to the curandero. The performance is executed with the accompaniment of prayers and entreaties, while the mushrooms are incensed briefly over a basin, in which copal (an incense-like resin) is burned. In complete darkness, at times by candlelight, while the others present lie quietly on their straw mats, the curandero, kneeling or sitting, prays and sings before a type of altar bearing a crucifix, an image of a saint, or some other object of worship. Under the influence of the sacred mushrooms, the curandero counsels in a visionary state, in which even the inactive observers more or less participate. In the monotonous song of the curandero, the mushroom teonanácatl gives its answers to the questions posed. It says whether the diseased person will live or die, which herbs will effect the cure; it reveals who has killed a specific person, or who has stolen the horse; or it makes known how a distant relative fares, and so forth.
The mushroom ceremony not only has the function of a consulation of the type described, for the Indians it also has a meaning in many respects similar to the Holy Communion for the believing Christian. From many utterances of the natives it could be inferred that they believe that God has given the Indians the sacred mushroom because they are poor and possess no doctors and medicines; and also, because they cannot read, in particular the Bible, God can therefore speak directly to them through the mushroom.
The missionary Eunice V. Pike even alluded to the difficulties that result from explaining the Christian message, the written word, to a people who believe they possess a means—
the sacred mushrooms of course - to make God's will known to them in a direct, clear manner: yes, the mushrooms permit them to see into heaven and to establish communication with God himself.